The University of Virginia has filed a petition to set aside civil investigative demands (CIDs) issued to it by the Commonwealth’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli.

CIDs are akin to grand jury subpoenas. Cuccinelli’s inquiry was prompted by public disclosure — via the ClimateGate leaks — of the highly questionable academic practices of former UVA assistant professor Michael Mann. The disclosure of Mann’s activities involved the apparent leaking of emails, computer code, and annotations to the code, all of which were subject to and being pursued under the United Kingdom’s Freedom of Information Act.

Arguing against the request that they produce records related to Mann’s use of taxpayer-funded grant money, UVA reeled off a litany of rationales — mostly general and repetitive — regarding why they do not need to comply.

UVA’s reason #8 — out of nine, its placement inherently recognizing its weakness — headlines the opening rhetoric of its petition and is being used by the school as a public relations hook:

Enforcing the CIDs will interfere with recognized First Amendment principles and important public policies protecting the academic freedom of institutions of higher learning from government intrusion into research and scientific inquiry.

You know, like Stanford University was immune from inquiry into misusing taxpayer funds earmarked for scientific research during the most notorious pre-ClimateGate academic scandal. Oddly, Time magazine’s coverage at the time was not concerned about “academic freedom” being imperiled: “Scandal in the Laboratories: Inquiries at Stanford turn a harsh light on how university research is funded.”

Gasp! “Inquiries”?

Stanford was no more exempt from laws, oversight, or conditions on how it spends taxpayer funds than are Mann or UVA. As a result, Stanford president and current Mann defender Donald Kennedy soon found himself out the door.

UVA’s current tack is simply to hope for public — and possibly judicial — sympathy to result from the escalating pressure campaign from what I call Big Science. Big Science is outraged that its constituents should be subject to laws applied to the little people and is desperate to expansively rewrite the concept of “academic freedom” as license to be free from compliance with those laws.

While Mann’s defenders were quick to unholster Hollywood-style shrieks of “McCarthyism,” the more appropriate analogy seems to be Tinseltown’s current victimization/canonization of Roman Polanski. He’s an artist! These laws you speak of, well, they exist, and surely have some merit, just … didn’t you see Chinatown?

The “I’m a scientist!” defense is the academy at its most cartoonish.

Doubling down on this unseemliness, the UVA then invokes Thomas Jefferson(!) while making the argument that laws are for others, and not preferred, protected classes of people. In its petition, UVA cites a 1950s Supreme Court opinion — Sweezy v. New Hampshire — for the following dicta:

To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. … Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate …

No, the ellipses do not suppress “… and to commit fraud, or otherwise disregard the laws of the land.” And no fancy Latin canon of construction — noscitur a sociis, ejusdem generis, in pari materia … take your pick, they all fail — informs a conclusion that the UVA argument is what the Sweezy Court intended.

But what of the two prongs of that risible “any strait jacket” business the school hangs its hat upon? Of two plausible readings of this, the less plausible is that “any” indicates the Supreme Court deemed academics, of “any” sort no less, to be beyond prosecution — so long as the perpetrator claims a research purpose (and with nothing less than the fate of the nation at risk were things otherwise! Sigh.)

Alternately, the university begs the question: where do standards applied to the rest of us end and a “strait jacket” begin? Or, where does protection of intellectual discourse — not actually at issue here, despite UVA hand-waving to the contrary — end and selective immunity from the laws of the land begin? These are now questions for the Virginia courts.

Sweezy is an Eisenhower-era opinion, written shortly before Ike’s farewell address. The address is famous for warning of a “military-industrial complex,” but also for warning:

Be alert to the equal and opposite danger ["opposite" of stifling academic freedom] that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

Sadly, this has come to pass, with the University of Virginia among its most zealous defenders.

UVA’s invocation of the wholly inapplicable Sweezy illustrates the barrenness of its legal cupboard, and no distraction will change that the precedent it cites is wholly irrelevant to Mr. Cuccinelli’s inquiry into possible civil fraud. The university expends great effort to make the issue other than what it plainly is.

“Academic freedom” has of course never meant selective sanctioning of unlawful behavior. And the attorney general is not, as the university claims to the court, “engag[ing] in scientific debate.” That the university cannot or will not see this only further makes the case that it is not capable of self-investigation.

Which raises a final point. In its petition, UVA proves far too much. For example, it references two other inquiries into aspects of ClimateGate. Where, pray tell, was the outrage by Big Science or academia over these two?

The answer is that the pretense of self-policing by the University of East Anglia and by Mann’s current home, Penn State, were both exercises in wagon-circling. When they were announced, Big Science remained mum because this was transparently so, as evidenced by their stacking panels with sympathetic parties highly unlikely to conclude otherwise than they did.

About these, UVA rather disingenuously claims “the subsequent investigations have not found any fraudulent conduct.” Of course they didn’t — neither inquired into fraud! Instead, both narrowly tailored their reviews to less treacherous waters.

By this mischaracterization to the court, UVA stretches the truth while doing its credibility no good. Which nicely summarizes the entire Mann affair.

45 Comments, 29 Threads

1.
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Well it is nice to see that UVa has learned after mishandling the Michaels’ affair. Sure it took a few years but at least UVa is finally standing up for academic freedom. I wonder if the university is only going to apologize to Michaels or will they offer him his job back.

UVA has not a legal leg to stand on. It was only too happy to turn over emails of a global warming skeptic to Greenpeace when a Democratic governor requested it do so. Its own past conduct negates any 1st Amendment argument. The state government should keep an estimate of its costs in litigating UVA’s obstructionist lawsuit and subtract that amount from UVA’s operating budget.

If the documents requested by Cuccinelli are turned over, I do not expect that there will be revelations that result in a successful prosecution of Michael Mann for fraud. None of the grant funds would have come to him directly. At most UVA might be required to refund the grant to the state. Absent an email in which Mann acknowledges that the prior climate research he relied upon in grant applications was fraudulent, Mann has a viable defense in the claim that he believed his own research results and those of other climate scientists. He just made a mistake. On the other hand, the documents may provide further evidence of cherry-picking of data and collusion to compromise the peer-review process.

I love one of the conclusions of the East Anglia investigation.
They found that since most climate scientists hid their data, there was nothing wrong with the East Anglia “scientists” doing so as well. It was in their words, standard practice in the climate science community.

Never mind that hiding data is an anethema to the rest of the scientific community. In most scientific circles, refusal to release data would result in any papers produced, being rejected out of hand. No need to analyze the results, if you can’t prove that your data is valid.

As a college student working on my BS in biology, I was told to record all data and observations in a bound page numbered notebook with dates. We were also told that it could be accepted as evidence in courts of law to settle such things as who discovered/invented something first. No classically trained scientist should have any qualms about sharing their data after they have made their “discovery” public through publication. I have no “kindred spirit” with anyone who withholds their data under these conditions and any other scientist worth their salt shouldn’t either.

Even as far back as high school, I had the page numbered bound notebooks. We were told that a missing page, a drop of white-out, or an eraser mark (even a single word written in pencil) was ground for failing the entire year. The motto was “A scientist shows everything”. If you do your physics, you show the intermediate steps, even if you are brilliant enough to do it instantly in your head (the valedictorian was). Without the work, you failed (he nearly lost his valedictorianship over that first test).

Even the appearance of hiding data was taken as solid evidence of cheating.

How are high school physics teachers holding teenagers to standards that universities are refusing to apply to nobel laureates?

Just like a global warmer – use ad hominim attacks instead of revelant facts.

Mann and crew are demonstrably NOT scientists. As I learned in junior high science class many years ago, a scientist is someone who follows the Scientfic Method. Those who REFUSE to follow the Scientific Method, who REFUSE to allow independent verification of their studies, who cherry-pick data to arrive at pre-determined are NOT scientists, no matter how many PhD’s they have after their name.

“Big Science is outraged that its constituents should be subject to laws applied to the little people and is desperate to expansively rewrite the concept of “academic freedom” as license to be free from compliance with those laws.”

Laws only apply to us serfs, not the nobility. Socialism/communism/progressivism/statism of any stripe, whereby an elite directs society towards specific goals is simply modern day feudalism.

Exactly! Socialism is simply neo-feudalism with a different set of aristocracy. That is why they do not believe in property rights or democracy.

“The Socialist Revolution in the US cannot take place because there are too many small independent farmers there. Those people are the stability factor. We here in Russia must hurry while our government is stupid enough to not encourage and support the independent farmership” V. Lenin, the founder of the Russian revolution

Exactly! Socialism is simply neo-feudalism with a different set of aristocracy. That is why they do not believe in property rights or democracy.

“The Socialist Revolution in the US cannot take place because there are too many small independent farmers there. Those people are the stability factor. We here in Russia must hurry while our government is stupid enough to not encourage and support the independent farmership” V. Lenin, the founder of the Russian revolution

Public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

This was a serious danger fifty years ago, when Eisenhower issued his warning;
Today, in a High-Tech society, science is too important to be left to the
scientists and the politicians; Total transparency must be the new standard.

It says something that Mann is not actively defending his work. He should welcome opportunity to explain everything about his work. I think it is important to note that there is no reason he cannot make it possible for others to reproduce his results. He is a modeler. He takes other people’s data and generates models. That data should be available. So should the methods. If he is unwilling I say take away his money.

UVA, circling the wagons……….when the original users of those “wagons” were entering uncharted relms of the new west they circled their wagons to ensure some semblence of saftey from a hostile enviroment and surprise attack from the local indian tribes. Today, those in academia are trying to circle the wagons against inquiring minds wanting to know the supposed truth that Universities are chartered to provide. Half baked theories that cannot be replecated by peer review are not science, they a theory period. These intellectual parasites are like fleas sucking the blood from their host. Now these “fleas” are complaining because the “host” has started to “scratch”, with increased vigor. If Mann wants to study some new theories, maybe he could research the amount of time “fresh-fish” introduced to the prison system become the object of “unwanted” affection.

Publicly funded research that is not weapons or other national defense related research should be a matter of public record. Climate research hardly comes in under those categories.

You know – I know – and every lame brained leftist econazi wanna be knows there is something wrong with these so-called scientists that peer review among themselves – and take every attempt possible to minimize or outright stop research papers from being published that do not agree with their own findings – even to the point of ridiculing them. These are matters of fact – that information is found in the ‘hacked’ emails and has been known even before they were ‘hacked’. Before these emails were made public we just had no real idea how rabidly these ‘scientists’ were in protecting their positions.

As for these emails being hacked – hardly.

UEA released these on their own – hoping it would act as a safety valve against the FOI requests that were stacking up like so much cord wood. FOI requests are still being stonewalled.

if it isn’t UVA’s ego of their relaitonship to Mann being threatend, perhaps it’s the fear of other “scientists” at this “august” insitution fearing they may be next to be held accountable for how they use their grants. To VA’s AG, keep up the good work – this isn’t about Mann’s scientific credentials, but HOW he used his grant money.

It’s been at least two years since I started seeing stories about “scientist-academics” with “warmist based” grants fearing how they were going to keep their grants coming with the increasing lighting shining on the scam.

I should ad, I read a comment by the spouse of a grant-application writer. that’s her job, she writes up applications. There can be NO deviation from a grant. You cannot take money from one section, and move it to another or it will invalidate the entire grant. there are indications that is precisly what Mann did. If it is proven, the state who bestowed the grant has the right to its money back.

In many ways, Michael Mann’s “research” seems to resemble that of Michael Belleisles. The author of “Arming America” also claimed he had proven his thesis (i.e., that gun ownership was not common in the U.S. prior to WW II), refused to release his raw data, and stood on his right of not having to ‘prove’ his case to “skeptics with an agenda”.

In the end of course he lost both his professorship, and the first Bancroft Prize ever rescinded by the foundation that awarded it.

That has not, however, stopped him from claiming that he was right all along in a new edition of his book, appropriately issued by Soft Skull Press. So what if he claimed to have consulted records in San Francisco that were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake? Or that he deliberately misrepresented a statement by George Washington? Or did similar things over a hundred times in his quest to delegitimize the Second Amendment?

He’s a scientist! (Well, a historian, supposedly.) And he is doing it for our own good, d****t!

In other words, we’ve been here before.

Maybe we should be inherently suspicious of young, up-and-coming, progressive academics named Michael?

I am a scientist and a UVA alumni, and find this absolutely repulsive. Falsifying data to advance a political agenda is the opposite of rational scientific inquiry. And then he hides under the cover of “academic freedom” to shield it from scrutiny. The University implicates itself in this coverup by defending him and his data from outside review, and will end up embarassing itself the process.

I agree with david (#21). I’m not a scientist, but I am a UVA alumnus who is completely dismayed by this development. Although I have had differences with my undergraduate alma mater–Dartmouth College–for several years, I regarded UVa as insulated from some of the worst academic excesses by virtue of its Jeffersonian heritage and its status as a public institution in a state that was at least somewhat conservative in orientation. Evidently, the university’s leadership is only too eager to show that it isn’t really any different from other campuses where ideology is more important than intellectual integrity.

As the smuggish UVA student guided my prospective student child and myself around the campus she claimed the HONOR CODE AT UVA was ingrained in all who were associated with “The University”. what a load of crap.

Long ago I was an assistant professor of nuclear engineering at The University of Virgiania(1964-67). The University had an Honor Code for students–I will not lie, cheat, or steal or condon those who do. All students had to sign this Honor Code and any violators where dismissed from school. As an employee of the school, I thought I should subscribe to the Honor Code so as to be a fit role model for the students. I let all students know my admiration for the Honor Code and used it as a teaching guide.

I still abide by the Honor Code and believe any person who ever worked at the school would share my opinion.

A long time ago I was an assistant professor of nuclear engineering at The University of Virginia(1964-67). At that time students had to obey an Honor Code–I will not lie, cheat, or steal or condone those who do. Students had to sign this oath and those who failed to obey where dismissed from the school.

As a faculty member, I thought I should obey the Honor Code so as to be a proper role model for the students. I let the students know my admiration for the Honor Code and used it as a teaching tool.

I still obey the Honor Code and believe anyone who worked for The University of Virginia would share my opinion.

The request for information from The University of Virginia on the activities of Michael Mann as an employee seems fair and I wonder whether The University’s decision not to cooperate could be characterized as its violation of The University of Virginia’s Honor Code.

As a graduate of the University of Virginia (1972), I am appalled and dismayed at how far the institution has sunk. The honor code has been destroyed, compliments of the academic’s who now run the place. Mann lied, cheated and stole. Further, the institution is owned by the citizens of Virginia, not the faculty.

Sounds like the UoV is in on the scam just as much as Mann. Mann needs to be in jail as soon as possible. The label scientist is not a license to lie.
All state funding should be cut to UoV until Mann is in jail.

I guess that I qualifiy as a scientist. I had graduate training in organic chemistry and occupational radiation protection, hold multiple patents, and was published in numerous peer reviewed journals.

Using procedurs I devised, I can now prove that the earth is flat and that the sun revolves around the earth. May I assume that I can publish those findings and that no one will be allowed to challenge them because I am a scientist?